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Barroso calls for halt to agencies

Commission president says the EU executive will not propose additional EU agencies until new rules have been agreed with member states.

European Voice

3/18/08, 6:00 PM CET

Updated 4/12/14, 3:05 PM CET

The European Commission will propose the creation of no further EU agencies until it has agreed new rules with national governments and MEPs, it announced on Tuesday (11 March). At the same time, it has put an end to the current discussions on agency rules by withdrawing the proposal it had made for an agreement with the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said: “European agencies have proved their worth – but the outstanding governance issues need to be addressed by our three institutions together.”

The EU has 29 agencies with regulatory responsibilities ranging from evaluating new medicines to setting transport and food safety standards. They employ some 3,800 staff and nearly half their annual budget of €1,100 million comes from the EU budget,with the rest derived from fees. There are also six executive agencies which manage specific policies such as research and education.

The agencies have been created over recent years to manage specific tasks. But the proliferation has raised concerns, especially in the Parliament, that the agencies, their internal procedures and their spending are not subject to the same level of scrutiny as the principal EU institutions.

The decision comes at a sensitive time as the Commission has proposed two major new EU agencies, for telecoms and energy market regulation, which are facing some opposition from member states and MEPs.

The Commission, the Council and the Parliament had been working since 2005 on an inter-institutional agreement on the legal basis for creating new agencies and setting out norms for their management and operation. But work has stalled, mainly because of disagreements between the Council and MEPs over the legal base. The Commission is calling for a new inter-institutional working group to examine the issue and report back by 2009. The Commission will also review its own internal systems for governing relations with agencies.

The move was welcomed by Jutta Haug, a German Socialist MEP, who has drafted all the Parliament opinions on agencies for the budgets committee since 2004. “This is a very sensible method,” she said, adding that all institutions needed to clarify what they wanted from agencies. Haug pointed out that while MEPs were often critical of the growth in the number of agencies, they had been responsible for approving them. In her view, negotiations with Council on a new agreement had failed because member states wanted agencies to be set up using a directive, which would reduce the

European Parliament‘s influence on the decision. It was not enough for MEPs just to be consulted, she said.